When past is not a prologue: Adapting informatics practice during a pandemic

Abstract

Data and information technology are key to every aspect of our response to the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic-including the diagnosis of patients and delivery of care, the development of predictive models of disease spread, and the management of personnel and equipment. The increasing engagement of informaticians at the forefront of these efforts has been a fundamental shift, from an academic to an operational role. However, the past history of informatics as a scientific domain and an area of applied practice provides little guidance or prologue for the incredible challenges that we are now tasked with performing. Building on our recent experiences, we present 4 critical lessons learned that have helped shape our scalable, data-driven response to COVID-19. We describe each of these lessons within the context of specific solutions and strategies we applied in addressing the challenges that we faced.

Keywords: COVID-19; analytics; applied informatics; lessons learned.

Figure 1.

Structure of the integrated team for cross-institutional management of resources and analytics. COVID-19: coronavirus disease 2019; EHR: electronic health record.

Figure 2.

A 2-dimensional density plot of influenza-like illness and coronavirus disease–positive patients presenting to clinics (with the darker blue dots showing higher-density areas).